The thing that had been in my mind ever since I had seen the slender thread of that cable suddenly crystallised and I turned to Jeff. ‘They had that engine going today, didn’t they?’
He nodded, straightening up and facing me, a frown on his friendly, open features. ‘What’s on your mind?’
I hesitated, strangely unwilling to put my idea into words for fear it should be impracticable. ‘You’re a mechanic, aren’t you?’ I said.
‘I run a garage, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Can you start that engine?’
‘Sure, but-’ He stopped and then he stepped forward and caught hold of my arm. ‘Don’t be crazy, Bruce. You can’t go up there on your own. Suppose the thing jammed or the motor broke down?’
The thought had already occurred to me. ‘There must be some sort of safety device,’ I said.
He nodded reluctantly. ‘There’ll be something like that, I guess. If the driving cable were disconnected gravity ought to bring it down.’ He took me outside and we climbed on to the cage. It was a big contraption, bigger than anything I had seen in the Swiss Alps. He flashed the beam of his torch on to the cradle where the two flanged wheels ran on the cable. There you are,’ he said. It was a very simple device. The driving cable was fixed to the cradle by a pinion on a hinged arm. If the motor failed all one had to do was knock the pinion out. The driving cable then fell on to a roller and a braking wheel automatically came into action. It was then possible to let the cage slide down on the brake. ‘See if you can get the motor started,’ I said.
Jeff hesitated, his gaze held by the shadowed void of the cliff face with its sugar-icing of snow at the top. Then he turned with a slight shrug of his shoulders. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘But it’ll be cold up there.’ There was a pilot engine for starting the big diesel. It was a petrol engine with battery starter. It started at a touch of the button. Jeff pulled the tarpaulin clear of the diesel, turned on the oil and a moment later the concrete housing shook to the roar of the powerful motor. I went to the car and got another coat and a rug. Jeff met me at the entrance to the housing. ‘Better let me go up,’ he said. ‘Tell me where that recording tape is that Boy wants and I’ll get it.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not a mechanic and I couldn’t run the engine. Besides, I want to see the place.’
He hesitated. ‘I don’t like it,’ he said. ‘These aren’t English mountains. You don’t want to go fooling around with them.’
‘I’ll be all right,’ I said.
He looked at me, frowning slightly. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Better take this.’ He handed me his torch. ‘They’ve rigged a phone up by the look of it. The wire probably runs through the main cable. Ring me from the top.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘If there’s anything wrong with the phone, I’ll bring the cage down at nine o’clock, giving one false start to warn you. If you don’t come down then I’ll run it up again and bring it down every half-hour. Okay?’
I nodded and checked my watch with his. Then I climbed on to the wooden platform of the cage. He shouted ‘Good luck’ to me and disappeared into the concrete housing. A moment later the note of the diesel deepened as it took up the slack of the driving cable. I watched the loop of the cable level out and become taut. The cage shook gently and then lifted from its staging. The wheels of the cradle began to turn, creaking slightly. The cage swung gently to and fro. I watched the engine housing slowly grow smaller and then I turned and faced the black rampart of the cliff.
It was an odd journey, alone there, slung in space in the moon-filled night. The rock jumble of the slide fell away steeply below me, a chequer-board of black and white. But ahead all was deep in shadow. A great concrete pillar moved towards me and slid past in the night, a vague shape as the cage ran from moonlight into shadow. For a moment the sound of the cradle wheels changed as they ran on the solid fixing of the cable. Then the whole cradle began to tilt sharply and the rate of progress slowed as it began to climb the vertical cliff face. I could just make it out now, a wall of bare rock criss-crossed with a pattern of white where snow and ice had lodged in crevices and on ledges. Looking back, the moon-white valley seemed miles away. I could barely see the tiny square of the engine housing. There was no sound except for the creaking of the- wheels. The wind whistled up through the cracks in the floor timbers. It was bitterly cold. I seemed hung in space, like a balloonist caught in an up-draught of air and slowly rising. I had no sense of vertigo. Only a great sense of loneliness.
It could only have been a few minutes, but it seemed an age that the cage was climbing the bare rock face of the fault. Then we lipped the top and I was in moonlight again and the world around was visible and white. The concrete pylon passed me so close I could have touched it. The cradle toppled down to an almost horizontal position. There was the sound of water in the shadowed bottom of the cleft and I glimpsed the slender veil of a fall wavering as it plunged the full length of the fault. Ahead of me now I could see the dam, a gigantic concrete wall, unfinished at the top and crumbling away in the centre where the stream ran through. The cage climbed the northern slope of the cleft until I was looking down on the top of the dam. Then it slowed and moved gently into a wooden staging that finished abruptly at a concrete housing similar to the one at the bottom. The cage stopped with a slight jerk that set the cables swaying.
I climbed stiffly out and looked about me. The dam was below me, looking like some pre-historic rampart built by ancient inhabitants to defend the pass. In places the concrete had crumbled away to spill out the great boulders that formed its core. The unfinished centre section, where the water frothed white over a small fall, gave it the appearance of having been breached in some early raid.
The top of the dam was partially covered by snow, but it was still possible to see the nature of its construction; two outer walls of concrete and the space between filled with rock and sealed with concrete.
My gaze swung to the Kingdom itself. It was a natural bowl in the mountains some five to ten miles long; it was impossible to judge the distance in that queer light. I couldn’t tell the width because a buttress of rock, part of the shoulder of the mountain, blocked my view. The place was completely bare, a white expanse of snow through which ran the black thread of the stream, branching here and there like the spine of a leaf into tributaries that faded rapidly beneath the snow. There was no sign of habitation.
I went into the concrete housing. There was no motor here, of course. It contained nothing but the big iron wheel round which the driving cable ran and some cans of grease. There was a field telephone on a wooden bracket. I lifted the receiver and wound the handle. Faint in my ear came the sound of Jeff’s voice. ‘You all right, Bruce?’
‘Yes. I’m fine.’ It was odd to think of him still down there in the valley with the car outside and the road snaking back to Come Lucky. I seemed to have moved into another world. ‘I can’t see Campbell’s shack from here,’ I told him. ‘It’s probably on the north side of the Kingdom and that’s hidden from me by a buttress of rock. I’ll ring you when I’m ready to come down.’